The Desiring Subject: Female Pleasures and Feminist Resistance in Deepa Mehta's Fire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Analysing Deepa Mehta's recent controversial film Fire, which portrays lesbian love between two sisters-in-law, both of them slighted in marriage by their respective partners, as a recourse against and resistance to patriarchal oppression, we find Mehta's portrayal guilty of watering down the politics of lesbian desire—as sexual preference within a larger sphere of sexual choices. Moreover, Mehta's location as an Indo-Canadian filmmaker must also be taken into account when judging Fire's gender politics. In recent Canadian cinema, a considerable emphasis is placed on the sexual agency of female protagonists, both as bearers of the 'look' (famously ascribed by Laura Mulvey to male viewers alone), as well as free choosers of sexual lifestyles. In Fire, however, by contrast, the protagonists' love and escape are matters of necessity, both seem ingly still driven by the male (non-) desiring gaze.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".